I'm going travelling and I was thinking of buying a cheap (£200 to £250) netbook to work on. I'll be using Microsoft Office and later perhaps Adobe Dreamweaver etc. A good keyboard would be nice, and it would help if it played movies and stuff. The top choices appear to be: Asus Eee PC 1005PE, Samsung N210, and HP Mini 210.James A Schofield

Those are all good netbooks, but they tend to sell in the £300-£320 range, though you can sometimes pick them up for around £280. For that sort of money, I'd go for the silver Toshiba NB305-10F, which is solidly made and has a very good isolated keyboard. Otherwise, most high-end netbooks now seem to have much the same specification: a 10in screen with a resolution of 1024 x 600 pixels, an Intel Atom N450 or similar processor, 1GB of memory, a 250GB hard drive, and Microsoft Windows 7 Starter. There's not much to choose between them, and you'd probably need to visit a computer superstore or department store (eg, John Lewis) to see which one you liked best.

If you want to stay within your budget, you could go for the Asus Eee PC 1001PX. This looks like a typical netbook except for the matte screen, but the specification has been dropped to get the street price down to £210-£230 (Amazon.co.uk puts the recommended price at £259). The PC 1001PX has a smaller 160GB hard drive, two USB ports instead of three, and some versions also have lower-quality Intel GMA 500 graphics instead of GMA 3150. It's a good machine, but I wouldn't recommend it for your purposes.

Netbooks are based on the idea that they will be used mainly for email, messaging and web-based applications rather than running desktop applications such as Microsoft Office and Dreamweaver. They can handle those up to a point, but can be overwhelmed. Rather than upgrading a netbook to 2GB of memory and Windows Home Premium, it would be better and perhaps cheaper to buy a mini-notebook, where prices start at around £350-£400.

Perhaps your best bet is the Dell Inspiron 11z, which looks like a netbook but has a notebook specification. It has a 1.3GHz Intel Celeron 743 ULV (ultra-low voltage) chip, and while I would usually recommend against a single-core processor, it will still run desktop applications much better than an Atom. The 11z also gets you 2GB of memory, Windows 7 Home Premium, and an 11.6in screen displaying 1366 x 768 pixels, all of which are worthwhile improvements over a netbook. The keyboard is also pretty good by netbook standards, and the touchpad is bearable. Maplin is currently selling the 11z for £299.99 (Order Code: A23JY).

Dell says the Inspiron 11z is being "transitioned" to (replaced by) the Inspiron M101z, which looks much the same. The M101z has two real mouse buttons, replacing the unloved 11z system where you have to use the corners of the touchpad. It also swaps the Intel Celeron 743 for (sadly) another single-core processor, the AMD Athlon II Neo. Prices start at £379, but going to a dual-core Neo pushes it up to £429, which is laptop not netbook territory.

Other cheapish mini-laptops with 11.6in screens include the Lenovo ThinkPad X100e (which has a very good keyboard), Lenovo IdeaPad U160, Hewlett-Packard DM-1, Acer Aspire 1410 (model 743G16n) and Samsung X125-JA01UK. Most have AMD Neo processors, though hopefully not the old and very slow MV-40 version. If you shop around, you can get either a ThinkPad X100e or an Acer Aspire 1410 for around £350, but this is clearly over your budget.

At the moment, the netbook industry is in a period of transition, as Windows XP comes to the end of its life and remaining stocks are jobbed off, and we try to move to more powerful dual-core Atom chips such as the 1.5GHz N550. There are already some N550-based netbooks on sale, such as the Asus Eee PC 1015PN, Acer Aspire One D255 and 533, and the Samsung N350, but the specifications are otherwise much the same: 1GB of memory, 1024 x 600 WSVGA graphics, and Windows 7 Starter. The netbook market looks short of innovation, but perhaps the manufacturers have switched their attention to Android tablets instead.

•James A Schofield is Jack's son. He bought a Dell Inspiron 11z and took it to Thailand and Malaysia.